Nascar ’14 Skipping PS4/Xbox One Because They Couldn’t “Justify” the $6 Million Development Cost

February 10, 2014Written by Jason Dunning

When Nascar ’14 comes out next week, you’ll only be able to grab the racing title on PS3 or Xbox 360, with Eutechnyx not developing the game for PS4 or Xbox One.

Explaining the reasons behind Nascar ’14 skipping the PS4 and Xbox One, Eutechnyx EVP Ed Martin told Extra Mustard, “We took a good, hard look at it, but there just isn’t enough hardware out there yet to justify the cost of development.”

Martin continued:

The nail in the coffin was when a guy from Sony talked about Gran Turismo and how their new game was launching on PS3. He said something like, ‘Why would we put Gran Turismo on a console that has zero units in the market when there are 150 million PlayStation 3s out there?’ Well, it’s a great question.

It costs us about $6 million to develop a next-gen version of Nascar. You have to sell an awful lot of copies in order to meet the development costs, on top of all the licensing. There are about 4-5 million worldwide combined units of PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, so it just doesn’t add up for us right now. We own the rights, and we absolutely have plans, but it won’t be later this year.

Giving a glimpse into how many people Martin believes will buy the game, he confirmed that “the most requested feature,” which allows up to 16 players create or join a league and then race their own Sprint Cup season, is expected to bring in “hundreds of thousands of people.”

Meanwhile, over on the Nascar Gaming Twitter account, they confirmed Nascar ’14 won’t be available on the Xbox Live Marketplace (and possibly PlayStation Store) at launch by saying, “Unfortunately it won’t at launch. MS/Sony have strict retail to digital windows.” They also have no idea when it will show up digitally.

The Twitter account also revealed that a gameplay video is coming soon and “there are no day-night transitions (same with weather), but we’re actually looking at this for the future.”

Are you planning on buying Nascar ’14? Let us know in the comments below.